Bees Feel Pain. Therefore…Insect Rights?

Animal Algorithms, animal rights, bees, consciousness, crops, Eric Cassell, Heather Browning, insect rights, insects, Kenny Torrella, London School of Economics, meat, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, pain, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, pests, PETA, PNAS, Research, science
As we learn more from research about how various life forms respond to experiences, a more complex picture may raise political issues. Source
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Complex Specified Information in the Lowly Sponge

architecture, arthropods, astronauts, Cambrian animals, Cambrian Explosion, Cambrian News, Cambrian strata, cementer cells, collagen, Current Biology, DNA, epithelial tissue, European Union, Intelligent Design, Mars, science, self-organization, spicules, sponges, temperature, termite mounds, termites, transport cells, vertebrates
Sponges are outliers in biology’s big bang, the Cambrian explosion. Their embryos appear in Precambrian strata, leading some to consider them primitive. Source
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Will Laws Protecting the Unborn Endanger Mothers?

abortion, abortionists, Amy Domeyer-Klenske, babies, consent, Dobbs v. Jackson, doctors, eclampsia, ectopic pregnancies, ethics, execution, fetus, health, heart disease, incompetence, Kendra Kolb, killing, Laws, Medicine, mothers, negligence, obstetricians, Roe v. Wade, science, suicide, unborn
A fallacy used by abortionists and their allies is that doctors will be handicapped by having to comply with the law applicable to the care of their patients. Source
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Darwin and the British Secularist Tradition

Adrian Desmond, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anglicanism, Baron d’Holbach, Charles Bradlaugh, Charles Darwin, Crisis of Doubt, Culture, Dover Beach, Edward Aveling, Erasmus Darwin, Faith & Science, In Memoriam, James Moore, John Henry Gordon, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, Origin of Species, Oxbridge, Robert Chambers, Secularism, The Oracle of Reason, The Rights of Man, Timothy Larsen, Tom Paine, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Victorian England
The arresting historical vignette of Darwin’s fraught meeting with Bradlaugh and Aveling at his country retreat would doubtless make for a good TV docudrama. Source
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Much Ado About Lactase Persistence

adulthood, Bethlehem, cattle, Darwin Devolves, Darwinian mechanism, devolution, elephants, eukaryotic cells, Evolution, genetic code, human mind, Isaac Newton, lactase, lactase persistence, lactose, loss-of-FCT, loss-of-functional-coded-element, metabolism, milk, molecular machines, mutations, nucleotides, Pennsylvania, physics, science, sugar, weaning, weather, worms
Nothing shows the feebleness of Darwinism quite so much as breathless stories about brand new results. This week the topic was “lactase persistence.” Source
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In Critiquing Dembski, Jason Rosenhouse Prioritizes Imagination over Reality

Ann Gauger, Arthur Hunt, bacterial flagella, biological structures, circular reasoning, Conservation of Information, design detection, Douglas Axe, Evolution, Günter Bechly, information, Intelligent Design, James Madison University, mathematics, mind, molecular machines, natural selection, Ola Hössjer, Panda's Thumb, probability space, Robert J. Marks, rotary motors, royal flush, specified complexity, The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism, William Dembski, Winston Ewert
Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician who teachers at James Madison University, is the author of the recent book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. The purpose of the book is to discredit the mathematical and algorithmic arguments presented by ID proponents against the plausibility of undirected evolution crafting complex novelties. Rosenhouse focuses much of his critique on William Dembski’s design-detection formalism based on specified complexity. Dembski responded in detail to Rosenhouse’s arguments, highlighting Rosenhouse’s confusion over Dembski’s theoretical framework and its application to biological systems (here,here). Rosenhouse in turn responded to Dembski’s critique. His counter-response, published at Panda’s Thumb, reveals that his opposition to Dembski is not based on any flaws in the substance of Dembski’s work but instead on Rosenhouse’s unassailable faith in the limitless Read More › Source
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